Thursday, 25 September 2008

Mbeki's legacy

President Thabo Mbeki, who has led South Africa since 1999, agreed Saturday to go quietly after the ruling ANC asked him to resign. Mr. Mbeki leaves behind a largely incompetent government fraught with nepotism and corruption, and a despondent country with weakened institutions, declining education and health standards, out-of-control violence and an HIV/AIDS pandemic. Troublingly, Jacob Zuma, the man who is likely to replace Mr. Mbeki, inspires even less confidence for the future of South Africa.

To understand the disappointment of the last decade in South Africa, it is important to contrast Mr. Mbeki with his predecessor. When Nelson Mandela emerged from his 27-year incarceration, he preached forgiveness and compassion and set about to forge a nation in which the whites -- his former jailers -- had an important role to play. Mr. Mbeki, on the other hand, remained a Marxist ideologue who never overcame the pain and prejudices of his life in exile.

In Mr. Mbeki's view the West oppressed the rest of mankind. Obsessed with race and colonialism, Mr. Mbeki undermined the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. To him, orthodox science "portrayed black people...[as] victims of a slave mentality." Rejection of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy was necessary to confront "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans." Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of South Africans died needlessly while Mr. Mbeki defended rejectionist scientists who claimed AIDS wasn't caused by HIV.

Similarly, it was Mr. Mbeki's warped ideology that led him to support Zimbabwe's dictator. Robert Mugabe couched his devastating economic policies in revolutionary terms -- as a just fight against alleged British plots and other delusions. For eight years the South African begged for more time for his "quiet diplomacy" while Zimbabwe burned. If the recent power-sharing deal between Mr. Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai works, it will do so not because of Mr. Mbeki's diplomacy but because of his departure. Mr. Mugabe may yet find it more advantageous to compromise with Mr. Tsvangirai than to deal with Mr. Zuma who criticized Mr. Mugabe in the past.

Mr. Mbeki' accommodating policy toward Mr. Mugabe exemplified a growing gap between the high-minded principles the South African claimed to follow in foreign affairs and the sordid reality of his policies. He cozied up to Cuba, Iran, and Libya. At the U.N., his diplomats worked with China to prevent a debate on human rights abuses in Burma. South Africa's intelligence minister visited Iran last year, where he praised Hezbollah and Hamas. In sum, Mr. Mbeki never encountered an anti-Western tyrant he did not like.

At home, he exhibited the authoritarian tendencies he had learned during his stint in the Soviet Union. He transformed the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation into a personal propaganda machine that banned some of his critics from appearing on it. He banished some of his competitors in the ANC by accusing them of trying to assassinate him. External dissenters, like the opposition Democratic Alliance, were weakened by persistent accusations of racism. That stifled public debate over the direction of South Africa's economic and social policies, including a murder rate that is nine times higher than that of the United States, and a healthcare system which according to the World Health Organization is worsening.

For all of Mr. Mbeki's faults -- and there were many -- South Africans may yet look back at his tenure with nostalgia.Mr. Mbeki was rightly praised for following good macro-economic policies that saw the budget deficit and public debt fall, and growth increase. But being reasonably tight with the public purse did not make Mr. Mbeki "business-friendly" -- as he was sometimes mischaracterized. Businesses in South Africa are heavily taxed (at 35%) and regulated. They also have to follow onerous race guidelines in employment and promotion. Micro-economic over-regulation has kept growth low (expected to come in at 2% this year) and contributed to a 26% unemployment rate. The number of people living in absolute poverty has doubled since the ANC came to power in 1994.

Mr. Mbeki's breathless drive to monopolize power has led him to attack the independence of the judiciary. According to a High Court judge, he tried to influence the judicial proceedings against his nemesis, former Deputy President Jacob Zuma. It was that apparent abuse of state power that finally gave the ANC leadership an excuse to ask Mr. Mbeki to resign.

Following Mr. Mbeki's departure, Mr. Zuma will most likely take over after the election in 2009, while a caretaker president will run the state affairs in the meantime. But Mr. Zuma is a deeply flawed man as well. The accusations of corruption against him persist. Moreover, his judgment has been called to question. When, during his rape trial, he was asked about the wisdom of having unprotected sex with an HIV positive woman, Mr. Zuma replied that there was no problem, because he "showered" afterwards.

There are also questions about his commitment to South Africa's fragile democracy. Mr. Zuma once famously predicted that the ANC would remain in power until "Jesus comes back." For all of Mr. Mbeki's faults -- and there were many -- South Africans may yet look back at his tenure with nostalgia.

Marian L. Tupy is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

____________________________________

Footnote:

AMERICA’S former president, Jimmy Carter, said the closest he has ever been to a fist fight was when former president Thabo Mbeki told him that anti-retrovirals for mothers infected with HIV/Aids was a plot of white people against black peopleRead more here

4 comments:

SA under Mbeki has clearly gone the same way as all sub-Saharan post-colonial African republics, without exception.

Nowhere in the world have blacks shown that they can produce stable, prosperous, law-abiding societies without white expertise.

They invariably degenerate into civil, i.e. tribal, warfare and regress to their original subsistence level of existence.

The anti-colonialists of the 1950s and 60s have a lot to answer for.

Re: HIV/AIDS, Ransome and Day in World Without AIDS indicate that the large multi-national corporations dump their failed drugs on the unsuspecting African populace and thereby wreak further havoc on indigenous standards of health, that could be raised significantly by proper hygiene and sanitation procedures, which tend to be Medieval in many parts of Africa. It is these unhealthy conditions, Ransome and Day cogently argue, that are largely responsible for AIDS-like symptoms in many sufferers.

Brittain will soon be the same , africans will breed the brits out of the country and overtake , make no mistake . Look at South Africa and its population statistics a 100 years ago.You Brits better do something fast or SA's present will be your future.

Into the Canibal's Pot - Ilana Mercer

National Conservatism

David Hamilton

Where's the Birth Certificate?

The Steadfast Trust

The Steadfast Trust is the first and only registered charity which undertakes work specifically for the ethnic English community.

Crimes of theTimes

Memories of Rhodesia

Keeping the Memories Alive Through Film & Book

Black Racism, White Victims

Not available via Amazon UK (naturally)

Seeing Through State Propaganda

By Mister Fox

White Refugees

Supporting Brandon Huntley and other white refugees from Southern Africa

Casuals United Blog

Four Flags

The Indigenous People of Britain

UN DECLARATION

The rights of indigenous peoples

SA World

Ex-patriot South Africans

Christian Europe

Stop Islam

Kriss Donald RIP

Where is the Kriss Donald Memorial Centre?

Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that thesepeople are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the tworaces, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature,habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."--Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:72

More of a conversation about Race

a new film by Craig Bodeker

A Conversation about Race

At YouTube

A Conversation about Race Website

"Fairness" Doctrine = Censorship

Censorship through boredom

International Free Press

Gates of Vienna

At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.

Daily Mash

Hunting Knives

Race crime in Britain

A few quotes from history

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." (Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote! (Benjamin Franklin)

"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise." (Adolf Hitler)

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lieBut rather mourn the apathetic throngThe cowed and the meekWho see the world's great anguish and its wrongAnd dare not speak. (Ralph Chaplin 1887-1961)